Saturday, October 25, 2014

Interview with photographer Ken Babbitt

Ken Babbitt has been a professional sports photographer since 1987, and his work has appeared on numerous baseball cards. He kindly answered my questions about cards.

"Where the majority of the more recent cards are action cards,
there's not really much to say about them. Back in the early days,
however, it was a bit different, as they were just about all posed
shots. One thing that I remember is more about a card that I didn't
shoot! I asked a kid, he was in the Yankees organization at the time,
if there was anything different that he wanted to do for a card photo.
He wanted to do the Heisman pose, with his batting helmet turned around.
I told him that I wouldn't send that in, so he pretty much refused to
do anything else. I believe what got sent in on him was a head shot.
That's more a behind the scenes tale of a card that never got shot. I
guess that I should have just done it!

Favorite
cards.....that I have done. In 1999 and 2000, Team Best did subsets
called "Babbitt's Bombers". They were simply minor league guys posed
with a big bat. They were all players that were supposed to be power
hitters. I shot Josh Hamilton just a couple of months after he graduated
from HS, and there were some other guys that made it, and some that
fizzled out before ever reaching the big leagues. We missed on a few!

Another
of my favorite cards is of a kid by the name of Mike Conroy who was
from my hometown. I had know him since he was 14, and his family
forever. He was a supplemental 1st rounder, taken by the Indians out of
high school in 2001. After his season ended, Upper Deck sent me an
Indians jersey and cap, and we met up behind Scituate (MA) High School
and did the photos.

Another for the favorites
file...I had gotten hooked up with what was then Pinnacle Brands, and
dealt with a photo editor by the name of Paul Glines, who has since
passed away. He was the first guy to help me correct things that that I
was doing, making my photos more "card worthy". During one of our
several phone conversations, I told him how I had become good friends
with Mo Vaughn, and had given my son the middle name Vaughn. He used
several of my photos for Mo's cards, including a couple with the big bat
shot at Fenway. Paul is a guy that I look back on as a true mentor in
this business, he was a wonderful man.

My
favorite card as a kid was the 1970(I believe) Frank Howard, shot at
Fenway with the Green Monster in the background.Not sure why, but I
always liked it.

As for collecting
cards......At this point, all I care about are the cards with my photos,
and I have fallen way behind in finding those. I'm sure that I'll never
complete that task!"

3 comments:

I miss the posed photos that used to be a baseball card mainstay... particularly the oddball ones.

We got excited about action photos because they were new and different... now they are pretty much all we get, and most of them are just as repetitive as the posed shots. At least with the posed photos, you could (almost) always see what a player's face looked like.